Hard resetting old Android phone might help!
Today my phone went into infinite loop of restarting background applications because of lack of RAM and in turn was a device whose main purpose is to drain battery in an hour or two, while being unusable for anything... anything! This in turn annoyed me to no end and I did a hard reset. Then the phone, after it was brought up to date with all applications I wanted, became speedy little devil as when it was new!
What a shitty way to find out another bad thing about Android :(
So, my phone is on Android 4.x, and yes, in 2018, this is ancient. And yes I've been eying for months on Google Pixel 2, or Essential PH-1, but any new phone has issues with it. As if they're half-baked to start with, the question is only if they're overpriced as well. But I digress... On a normal day, my 5 year old phone, was quite usable, though on its off days it was miserable to wait to quickly open an PDF, or even for UI to work fluidly enough without seconds of awkward waiting...
And yes, time and again, visiting Google Play was an effort in deciding which apps to delete to allow some apps to update due to very poor Google's decision to partition the internal memory the way they did prior to Android 5.x. Though a few gigabytes linger free on a "user" partition, you cannot update a 26MiB app.
But today was different... The phone was sluggish to no end so I restarted it. Aaand that was a mistake. Upon boot, it started to run background applications which filled up memory, and went into a loop of killing the apps, and restarting them again with ~50MiB of RAM left. This was a non ending process of fast battery drain and extremely poor performance.
Of note was that launcher app started showing applications which were deleted years ago from the phone. Which made me think Google has managed to make underlying Linux perform like a Win98 machine.
After some more frustra... consideration, I've decided to wipe it all, do a hard reset and delete all content on "SD card". And unfortunately for my opinion that "Android isn't that great, but isn't that bad either", this "fix" worked.
Yes, it took awhile to reinstall all the apps, but the phone now behaves as if it was bought yesterday. UI is fluid, Google Play doesn't nag about missing space for update (though I've decided not to update some apps I don't use anyway), the overall performance is astonishing to say the least.
So, in the end, maybe we should treat Androids (at least older ones), as an ancient Windows machine. Perhaps a clean reinstall is needed after a few years. And yes, although now the applications that were few megabytes, are in the tens of megabytes and some pass even hundred, this is not the main reason older devices are slow. Poor uninstall management in Android is...
Makes you think, doesn't it... If you're at the position of buying a new phone since your has become unusably slow, rather then putting it in that drawer with old gadgets, try a hard reset. It might bring it to life for a few more months or even a year. And who knows, maybe Google Pixel 3 wont be a half baked overpriced gadget like first and second are...
NOTE: Don't do this with devices older than 4.x. Google Play won't work and you won't be able to update apps. I still have Android 2.x device which runs ok, but "Android Market" is long gone. Leave them as they are and with what they have on them. They're still fine for odd game here and there to reminisce of the olden times of Android.